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Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Psychodynamic theories focus on how a child's instinctual mind interacts with his or her social environment and the important people in it to produce many characteristics and behaviours. A child's mind is viewed as a dynamic and active force. It has certain characteristics, many of which are innate, that drive the child to act in certain ways. In addition, components of the mind interact with each other; the results of these interactions influence how a child thinks, feels, and behaves. All humans have instincts; we never lose them; and they influence our behaviors throughout our lives. They are part of what makes us human. These instincts have energy, and they drive our behaviour in predictable ways. This is an essential concept. Our instincts push us to think, feel, and behave in certain ways rather than simply reacting to the world around us. Just as we drive a nail into wood, a car down the highway, or our parents crazy, our instincts drive us. Conflicts develop when our instinctual drives contact the society around us, which is often intolerant of our instincts and demands that we conform our behaviour to societal expectations (Ziegler, 2002). Beginning early in our lives, we realize that we cannot simply follow the impulses of our instinctual drives. Instead we must regularly restrain them so that we do not act in ways that anger those on whom we depend (our parents early in our lives, but also teachers, romantic partners, drill sergeants, employers, and others as we go through life). So there is ongoing tension between the drives of our instincts and the demands of the society around us. Who we are as children and later as adults is largely determined by how we handle this tension. To the extent that our instincts and the expectations of society can coexist, we are content. To the extent that they cannot, we are anxious, frustrated, angry, or unhappy.

Existential Counselling

While the techniques of existential psychotherapy can include Freudian, Jungian, Gestalt, cognitive, behavioural or other methods, the fundamental technique shared by all existential therapists is phenomenology. Phenomenology refers to the conscious setting aside of preconceptions and dogma in an effort to discover the client or patient's actual subjective experience or "being" (Dasein). It is through this that the true experience, will and intentionality of the patient at any given moment may be discerned, understood, and appropriately responded to by the therapist. The focus of treatment is on the present, here-and-now, current circumstance, rather than exclusively on early formative influences. While the power of the past and of unconsciousness-- those aspects of ourselves of which we are unable or unwilling to become aware-- to influence the present detrimentally is recognized and addressed as it arises in treatment, the patient's subjective experience of self ("I am") and of the therapeutic encounter is of primary importance.

Cognitive Therapy

When most of us consider the connections between our emotions and our thoughts, we tend to believe that our emotions drive our thinking: If we are feeling sad we will think about sad things; if we are feeling anxious we will think about things and people that make us anxious. Consequently, when we are feeling sad or anxious, we try to change our emotions so we will stop having so many negative thoughts. Cognitive theorists, however, believe just the opposite: Our thoughts drive our emotions. I feel sad because I am thinking depressive thoughts; I feel anxious because I am thinking anxious thoughts. Thus changing how we think will change our emotions. If we stop thinking about so many depressing things, we will feel less depressed; if we stop thinking about everything that can go wrong next week, we will stop feeling anxious.

Behavioral Therapy

Behavioral theories differ fundamentally from psychodynamic theories in many ways. Rather than focusing on the interplay of unseen dynamic forces of the mind, they focus on observable behaviours; rather than arguing that a person's unconscious has important influences on his or her behaviours, they state that forces in the environment and outside the person have the primary influence. Behaviours, they believe, are shaped by their antecedents (things occurring before the behavior) or consequences (things occurring after the behavior) or both, rather than by unseen mental processes. Thus as they try to understand a child's behavior, behaviorists focus not on processes inside the child's mind but on observable stimuli that elicit the child's behavior or on observable responses to the child's behavior. When analyzing a particular behavior, behaviorists focus primarily on the present. Although they might have some interest in how a behavior developed earlier in a child's life to provide some context for understanding it, the primary focus is on how that behavior is being maintained by current antecedents and consequences. Although behaviorists understand that it is through past environmental influences that behaviours have developed, their primary goal is to understand how behaviours are maintained currently so that they can be changed in the present (Wilson, 1989).